People engage with their various personal electronic devices and computers in order to consume many types of online content. In addition, people use their devices and computers to participate in social networks and social media. The online content includes news, sports, politics, educational information, cute puppy videos, and much, much more. The social networks support sharing, discussions, and commentary, among many other social activities. Users of social networks engage these online platforms or “digital soapboxes” to boast about their accomplishments; share photographs of their pets, children, and vacations; rant about politics at the local, national, and global levels; and partake in other popular social activities. The social networks can enable a feeling of connectedness, albeit through a screen, since the networks enable friends, family, and followers to ‘keep in touch”, even over great geographic distances. While the social networks are not completely sufficient replacements for face-to-face interactions, the online interactions supported by the personal electronic devices are often believed by the users to be quite close. Social networks are very effective at conveying messages that the message authors want to share. The social networks can also collect information from the participants to learn about the participants, to suggest content that might be of interest to the participants, and to track the types of information that are emerging and/or popular on the social networks. This last type of data is used in order to determine the social media content that is “trending”. The trending information is used to track political activity, the spread of disease throughout a population, and the latest celebrity gossip, among many other possibilities.
An important element of social media is a representation of a person that an individual or other users of social media will associate with the person. The representation can take the form of a profile picture of the person, or it can be some kind of abstraction of the person's character, such as an avatar. An avatar, chosen by the person, can be a powerful tool in representing a person to himself and/or other persons on social media or other digital platforms. Avatars can range from a simple emoji, such as a smiley face, to an abstraction of a person's profile picture, such as an Instagram™ filter.